Renaissance exhibitions in Paris

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Renaissance exhibitions in Paris

A broad range of works from the Renaissance period is in the spotlight in two concurrent exhibitions in Paris. One, at the Musée de Cluny, investigates artistic creativity during the tumultuous reign of Charles VII between 1422 and 1461; the other, at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, carries the narrative forward and provides a panoramic view of Renaissance Humanism. The comparison demonstrates how art, in a variety of media, could serve, on the one hand, as a weighty symbol of dynastic authority and, on the other, as an intimate aid to private study and devotion.

by nicholas herman

This spring paris celebrates the Renaissance with a series of stellar exhibitions. The Musée du Louvre sees the spectacular unveiling of Jan van Eyck’s Virgin of Chancellor Rolin (20th March–17th June), following a centuriesoverdue cleaning and conservation of the panel.1 Alongside the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) is offering a panoramic display of its rarely seen Renaissance holdings (20th February–16th June).2 Overlapping with these shows is a compelling exhibition at the Musée de Cluny – Musée national du Moyen Âge, dedicated to the reign of Charles VII between 1422 and 1461 and the complex interplay of politics and the arts in mid-fifteenth-century France (12th March–16th June).3 This review focuses on the latter two events.

The newly renovated museum of the BnF’s Richelieu site opened in 2022 and includes an attractive gallery that supersedes the long-neglected Cabinet des médailles. The space for temporary exhibitions, the Galerie Mansart on the ground-floor, has remained in place but has also been renovated.4 It is here that The Invention of the Renaissance: the Humanist, the Prince and the Artist, is taking place. This fine exhibition of 204 objects provides a wide-ranging account of the origins and expansion of Humanism, illustrated by extraordinary manuscripts and printed books and with supporting roles played by single-sheet prints, drawings, tooled bindings, coins and medals from the BnF, as well as portraits and devotional paintings, small bronzes and relief sculptures strategically lent by the Louvre and the Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris. The latter is closed for renovations, providing a golden opportunity to highlight its quattrocento collections, which are usually sequestered in the historic but mostly inaccessible nineteenth-century salle des sculptures on boulevard Haussmann.

This is more of a showcase than a research-driven exhibition. The handsome catalogue, edited by the curators Jean-Marc Chatelain and Gennaro Toscano, is a compendium of well-written but summary thematic essays drawing on examples from the BnF’s collections, accompanied by

1 Revoir Van Eyck is reviewed by Paula Nuttall on pp.626–28 below.

2 Catalogue: L’invention de la Renaissance: L’humaniste, le prince et l’artiste. Edited by Jean-Marc

Chatelain and Gennaro Toscano.

264 pp. incl. numerous col. ills. (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, 2024), €49. ISBN 978–2–7177–2959–7.

1. Jacopo Antonio Marcello, attributed to Jacopo Bellini. 1453. Tempera on parchment, 18.7 by 13 cm. (Bibliothèque national de France, Paris, MS 940, fol.38v).

very brief catalogue entries. There are, however, some exciting new finds sprinkled throughout the display. Conceptually, the show is more focused and in-depth than the inaugural exhibition of the Louvre-Lens museum, Renaissance: Révolutions dans les arts en Europe, 1400–1530, in 2012–13 and broader than the bibliophilic Trésors Royaux: La Bibliothèque de François Ier, held at the château royal de Blois in 2015.5 This is primarily an occasion to admire the BnF’s comprehensive multimedia array of Renaissance works, rivalled only by the Vatican in scope and richness. An important undercurrent is the range of collecting histories that led to the arrival en masse of such extraordinary books, mostly of Italian origin, in the French royal collections. The seizure by Charles VIII (1470–98) of 1140 volumes from the Aragonese library at Naples in 1494 and of four hundred more from Pavia in 1499 by Louis XII (1462–1515) were the primary vectors, but a host of other conduits existed too, such as the books sold in France a few years later by the exiled Aragonese king Frederic of Naples (1452–1504) to Cardinal Georges d’Amboise (1460–1510), or the luxurious volumes presented directly to Gallic officials by Italians, including a Life and Passion of St Maurice, written by the Venetian condottiere Jacopo Antonio

3 Catalogue: Les arts en France sous Charles VII: 1422–1461 Edited by Mathieu Deldicque, Maxence Hermant, Sophie Lagabrielle and Séverine Lepape. 304 pp. incl.

311 col. ills. (Grand Palais Rmn Editions, Paris, 2024), €45. ISBN 978–2–7118–8019–5

4 See A. Gajewski: ‘The new museum in the Bibliothèque nationale, Paris’,

Marcello, who presented it to Jean Cossa, the seneschal de Provence and adviser to King René of Anjou (1409–80); the volume’s portrait of Marcello is attributed to Jacopo Bellini (cat. no.155; Fig.1); another example is the beautifully illustrated De laudibus Galliae (no.195; Fig.2), offered by the sycophantic poet Giovanni Michele Nagonio to Louis XII.

The exhibition is impeccably installed, spacious and with calming light turquoise walls. In the opening section the panels representing Plato, Aristotle and Ptolemy from the Urbino uomini illustri cycle (1472–76; Louvre; no.1, A–C), commissioned by Federico da Montefeltro, evoke the bibliophile’s studiolo. A particular showpiece is a compendium of works by Petrarch and Dante (1476; BnF; no.11), commissioned for Lorenzo de Medici and illuminated by Francesco d’Antonio del Chierico, which is covered with appliqués by Antonio del Pollaiuolo. It was offered to Charles VIII on the occasion of his entry to Florence in 1494. Visitors are reminded of the cultural authority that the great Tuscan poets held in

THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 165 (2023), pp.630–37.

5 The Louvre-Lens exhibition was reviewed by Neville Rowley in this Magazine, 155 (2013), pp.196–96;

for the Blois exhibition, see M. Hermant, ed.: exh. cat. Trésors royaux: la bibliothèque de François Ier, Blois (château royal de Blois), 2015.

2. Frontispiece. (From Giovanni Michele Nagonio: De laudibus Galliae, Rome c.1500.) Ink and tempera on parchment, 27 by 16 cm. (Bibliothèque national de France, Paris, MS latin 8132, fols.8v–9r).

France, their most fertile foreign ground for early reception. This rst room also introduces another theme of the show: the gradual di usion of the Mantegnesque all’antica style. This is illustrated by six pairs of allegorical gures from the so-called Tarocchi del Mantegna (c.1465; BnF; no.2) alongside an early stylistic homage: a detached historiated binding (c.1510; BnF; no.3) decorated with four virtues, painted by the eccentric court painter of the Angoulême house, Robinet Testard. A wallmounted reproduction of Vincenzo Catena’s St Jerome in his study (1510; National Gallery, London) sets the scene, although here, as elsewhere, additional loans might have helped alleviate the need for such visual aids. One thinks, for example, of Vittore Carpaccio’s engrossing Vision of St Augustine (1502–08; Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, Venice) recently shown at the exhibition Vittore Carpaccio: Master Storyteller of Renaissance Venice at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in 2023.6 The Paris exhibition is essentially a plunge into that rich material world of pensive reading, exempli ed in a tongue-and-cheek manner by a binding on display (1528; BnF; no.10) inscribed with a Latin motto from Seneca, ‘Leisure without study is death’.

The second room moves backwards in time by about a century to excavate the roots of such inspired otium. It is dedicated to Petrarch and the birth of Humanism, a story linked to France both by the poet’s time spent in Avignon during what he called the papacy’s Babylonian captivity, and the transfer of much of the author’s surviving library into the French royal collections in the 1490s through conquests in northern Italy. Five books owned and annotated by Petrarch himself are showcased, including a ninth-century Greek Plato (BnF; no.21) and an impressively large Romanesque copy of Augustine’s Ennarationes in psalmos ( rst quarter of the 12th century; BnF; no.17), once owned by the Franciscans of Siena and later given to Petrarch by none other than Boccaccio. Here and throughout the exhibition, lovingly annotated books with unbroken chains of provenance provide a moving material link to a foundational intellectual chapter of Western art and literature. The other side of this second room is dedicated to the di usion of a visual trope that Petrarch himself could never have foreseen: the six allegorical triumphs from his poem I Trionfi (1351–74) transformed into enduring parade-like processions from the mid- fteenth century onwards on parchment, paper and in bronze, in Italy but also north of the Alps, as a colourful illuminated opening by the Master of Petrarch’s Triumphs demonstrates (c.1503; BnF; no.26). The stage is set for the move from Petrarch’s rather studious life to the pervasive visual and poetic Petrarchism of succeeding centuries.

The third room is the largest and most splendid. It is divided between the topics of bibliophilia – in this case the quest for ancient codices spearheaded by Po io Bracciolini (1380–1459) – and the slightly later adaptation of the all’antica ornamental style to all manner of books, bindings and prints. Older copies of Classical texts owned by such humanist heavyweights as Coluccio Salutati (1332–1406), Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444) and Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457) demonstrate that medieval manuscripts remained prime objects of interest for Renaissance antiquaries. For instance, the display includes examples of Romanesque manuscript initials, which served as prototypes for the bianchi girari, white vine decoration that is characteristic of quattrocento illumination but based on eleventh- and twelfth-century styles (c.1150; BnF, no. 37), thought to be in continuity with lost antique exemplars. As the fteenth century progressed, the advent of moveable type and replicative images played a major role; this is alluded to in a wall map illustrating the major European

6 Reviewed by Beverly Louise Brown in this Magazine, 165 (2023), pp.179–183.

7 N. Coilly and C. Vrand, eds: exh. cat

3. St John on Patmos from the Hours of Frederick III, by Jean Bourdichon, Giovanni Todeschinoand the Master of Claude de France. 1501–02. Tempera on parchment, 24.5 by 15.5 cm. (Bibliothèque national de France, Paris, MS latin 10532, p.62).

Opposite

4. Manuscript binding, by Étienne Roffet. c.1542–43. Gilt-tooled leather, 33.5 by 23 cm. (Bibliothèque national de France, Paris, MS latin 6866, upper cover).

Imprimer! L’Europe de Gutenberg, Paris (Bibliothèque nationale de France) 2023.

centres of printing in 1500. A more dynamic digital display, showing the exponential diachronic spread of the new technology, would have been helpful here. The determinative role played by the printers of the Rhine valley is side-lined: a BnF exhibition at the Tolbiac site, Printing! Gutenberg’s Europe, in 2023 covered much of this ground.7 A central vitrine shows the genesis of editorial work in the form of glossed copies and printers’ proofs, while another showcases translations from Greek into Latin and the vernaculars. Portraits of Desiderius Erasmus (1526; Bnf; no.119) and Manuel Chrysoloras (c.1420; Louvre; no.42) look on, but little is said of the philhellene Cardinal Bessarion (1403–72), whose library ended up not

Renaissance exhibitions in Paris

Important manuscripts include the Cosmographia for Alfonso of Aragon (1475–80; Bnf; no.67), which is so large that it requires a special vitrine; the chaotically charming destruction of Troy, illustrated by workshop of Jean Colombe (c.1500; Bnf; no.50); and the Hours of Frederick of Aragon, jointly produced by Joan Todeschino, Jean Bourdichon and the Master of Claude de France (no.63; Fig.3). These examples show contrasting visions of antique architecture north and south of the Alps, and their possible synthesis through collaboration. The Louvre’s album of drawings by Jacopo Bellini (c.1430–55), perhaps too fragile to be lent, is missing here as a crucial precursor to later attempts not only to replicate the ancient, but to forge a synthetic ornamental style that could be adapted to any situation. Among these treasures is only one example of a book containing purple-stained parchment (c.1463–64; Bnf; no.180), a fascinating revivalist phenomenon that is the subject of current study by several scholars and deserves an exhibition on its own.

The large, penultimate room is dedicated to knowledge and glory. The focus is on concepts of personhood, from renderings of the Vitruvian man to portrait medals, here shown in a particularly evocative way by juxtaposing a number of Pisanello’s great medals with illuminations bearing ctive medallions. Especially thoughtful is the pairing of the above-mentioned portrait of Marcello by Bellini with Jean Bourdichon’s Twelve Caesars, a recent acquisition (c.1515–20; Bnf; no.152): separated by seven decades, they each make use of purple-blue contour shading known as shredding, which, like the Renaissance bronze medal, seems antique but is in fact an invention of the fteenth century. A series of wall-mounted portraits of men show the triumph of the pro le view. A single female bust by Francesco Laurana (late 15th century; Musée Jacquemart-André; no.169) breaks the mould; the sitter is unidenti ed.

The small nal section, ‘From the Humanist Library to the Princely Library’, focuses on illustrious patrons who co-opted the prestige of the scholarly humanist library in order to gain an allure of magnanimity. Throughout, but especially in this last section, richly tooled bindings from north and south of the Alps are showcased, although the French examples, by the Relieur de Salel Étienne Ro et, the rst o cial binder to the king (1543; no.200; and no.129; Fig.4) are several decades later in date than most of the other material. One might ask whether the rarity of early humanist-style bindings in France is merely the result of poor survival or whether changes in book storage and display led to their proliferation only in the 1530s and 1540s.

One class of item missing from the otherwise rich evocation of the material culture of Humanism on show is the epistolary letter. Books circulated, of course, but we know that gift exchanges and artistic commissions were often accompanied by extensive correspondence, the connective tissue that enabled humanist thinkers to exchange ideas more informally. One thinks again of Carpaccio’s depiction of St Augustine, his workspace littered with bundles of missives alongside all the books. A few borrowed items, perhaps from the Archives nationales de France, might have helped ll this lacuna. Another absence is schoolbooks and more informal notes. Even annotated manuscripts shown here are largely pristine, but there is a whole underclass of scrappy notebooks and commonplace books from this period that can help give a vivid, if messy, sense of how Classical ideas were learned and disseminated by a slightly broader spectrum of society. But a single exhibition cannot, of course, do everything.

Rich as they are, both the display and the catalogue are rather traditional in their approach; for example, they sidestep any detailed discussion of the role of women in the story of Humanism. That is a shame, because the Louvre has paintings and oor tiles from the studiolo of Isabella d’Este and her chalk portrait by Leonardo (c.1500). These could

have been included, if only as the exception to the rule that con rms Humanism as a predominantly aristocratic, white, male-dominated phenomenon. Nor does the exhibition problematise or historicise the plunder of libraries during the French campaigns of the 1490s in Italy. A more concerted look at period assessments of these actions would have been illuminating. No indication is given that these are ill-gotten gains, even if some were themselves previously looted, such as the Petrarchian books mentioned earlier, taken by the Visconti during the conquest of Padua in 1388.

Ultimately, this exhibition is successful because it does not merely use choice objects to evoke self-contained visual and stylistic trends, which is typical of major museum exhibitions. Instead, it carefully exposes the intricate intellectual mechanisms – antiquarianism, philology, bibliophilia, self-representation and, especially, otium, which undergirded early Renaissance culture. Perhaps unintentionally, L’invention de la Renaissance instils a more wholistic, interdisciplinary and object-driven understanding of this crucial period. It will please historians of images, ideas and texts in equal measure.

There is a small but meaningful overlap between the Bibliothèque nationale and Musée Cluny exhibitions. The latteris focused on works of art produced for domestic consumption in France in the reign of

6. Supplicant in prayer, excised leaf of the Collins Hours, by the Master of the Collins Hours. c.1445–50. Tempera and ink on parchment, 18.5 by 12.5 cm. (Musée de Cluny–Musée national du Moyen Âge, Paris, MS Cl.23945).

Charles VII between 1422 and 1461, before the fully-fledged Italophilia that so preoccupied his successors. In this compact but rich display visitors are immediately plunged into the complex political and military environment of France at the conclusion of the Hundred Years War. It is therefore fitting that the atmosphere is more cramped and crowded here, a result of the Cluny’s relatively small exhibition space, which occupies the Roman frigidarium of the baths of Lutetia. Visitors are reminded from the outset that the exhibition fills the gap between two relatively recent, much larger shows: the Louvre’s Paris 1400: Les arts sous Charles VI in 2004 and France 1500: Entre Moyen Âge et Renaissance, at the Grand Palais, which travelled to the Art Institute of Chicago, in 2010–11.8

The logistics of such an exhibition are complex, for paintings and metalwork that survive from this crucial period in France are sparse and fragmentary, allowing only glimpses of their high quality. Flamboyant Gothic architecture played a major role, as for example in the innovative Hôtel Jacques Cœur, Bourges, or the intricate façade of Saint-Gatien, Tours, but it is, understandably, difficult to convey this in an exhibition. Elaborate manuscripts from the period abound. Unlike the humanist works exhibited at the Bibliothèque nationale, which often have decoration concentrated in a single grand frontispiece allowing for easy display, the books of hours prevalent in France incorporate dozens of images, making the presentation of a single opening, by necessity, only partially satisfying. A case in point is the idiosyncratically spectacular Rohan Hours, which contains eleven full-page, fifty-four half-page and 227 small miniatures (c.1430–35; BnF; no.75).

7. Detail of the central panel of the Aix Triptych showing the books on the Virgin’s lectern, by Barthélemy d’Eyck. 1443–44. Oil on panel. (Sainte-Madeleine, Aix-en-Provence; photograph the author).

Objects that do survive are often difficult or impossible to lend, although the excellent catalogue does a good job of illustrating the absent key works. The monumental Crucifixion of the Parliament of Paris, attributed to André d’Ypres (c.1450; Louvre), with its famous view of the Louvre and the Ile de la Cité, was not available, making the presence of the Dreux Budé Triptych (c.1450; left panel Musée du Louvre; central panel J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; right panel Musée Fabre, Montpelier; nos.103–105) by the same painter all the more important. Most of the forty detached miniatures by Jean Fouquet from the Hours of Étienne Chevalier, the undisputed high point of mid-fifteenthcentury French art, are sequestered at the Musée Condé, Chantilly. Only a single, loose miniature, showing St Anne and her daughters, is shown (c.1364–70; BnF; no.48). The loan of the alabaster effigy of Charles VII’s beloved paramour Agnes Sorel from the collegiate church of SaintOurs, Loches, had to be cancelled with short notice due to conservation issues, although it is still described in the catalogue (1450; no.133).

Other potential loans have perhaps fallen prey to the recent proliferation of rather small exhibitions and to the Van Eyck exhibition in the Louvre. Whereas Fouquet’s portrait of Charles VII from the Louvre is present (c.1450–55; no.29) and looms appropriately over the first section, his Melun diptych (c.1452–55) is absent. The left panel showing Étienne Chevalier presented by his namesake saint (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin) and the right panel depicting the Virgin and Child (Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp) were reunited in the Gemäldegalerie in 2017–18, during the closure of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts; they are evoked here only by a clever black-and-white reproduction, in which the enamelled self-portrait of Fouquet (c.1452–55; Louvre; no.131), originally part of the frame, is embedded. The catalogue also includes the first